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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29933847">The Stolen Season</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotboy/pseuds/robotboy'>robotboy</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Deadwood</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Extended Metaphors, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 22:40:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,696</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29933847</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotboy/pseuds/robotboy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sol kissed the spot on Seth’s cheekbone, and knew from the way Seth unraveled that none of the others did this, that it was his own little place. A quarter-inch kingdom, prone to plague and conquest and inclement weather.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Seth Bullock/Sol Star</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Stolen Season</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">The first thing Solomon Star knew about Seth Bullock was that he was beautiful, and he spent the rest of their acquaintance trying his damnedest to forget it.</p><p class="p1">Seth was a handsome man, though Sol intuited early in their friendship that Seth resented this attribute in much the way one might resent a lazy eye or a sloping posture: an unfortunate congenital affliction that interfered with him being taken seriously. Sol was gracious enough to do the appreciating on his behalf, though the better he got to know Seth, the more incongruent those long lashes and supple mouth were with Seth’s character. The only things Sol would insist were fundamental to Seth, not to mention Sol’s affection for him, were the greening-copper tint in his eyes and the spot beside the left, Sol’s favourite place in the world.</p><p class="p1">Now Seth had a way, when angered or ashamed, of radiating such powerful emotion as to make the surrounding air taste of soap. Sol had only earned the full force of it twice, and the stomach-turning unpleasantness was worth the subsequent realisation that Seth had a means of aiming it, and avoided aiming at Sol in all other instances of its deployment.</p><p class="p1">Sol wondered whether the rancid atmosphere Seth emanated at will was to compensate for his face, which when upset remained as pretty as moonlight on a river, the likeness more uncanny for Seth’s tendency to cry in a temper—a trait as ill-suited as the rest of his visage for the calling which he felt so strongly. Otherwise, the ability to mystically putrefy his surroundings must be hereditary: Sol only recognised the technique from his mother, whose moods could foul the ground underfoot and wilt flowers, a harbinger of the tongue-lashing sure to follow. Sol had been reminded of her, the first time he’d hurt Seth’s feelings, so viscerally that he’d been surprised when Seth’s following words had not been in quick and scathing Yiddish.</p><p class="p1">The second occasion had brought Sol reeling to the future, rather than the past, with the force and tang of smelling salts. He had made some dismissive comment about their plan to open a store, meant to align with the hemming and hawing Seth persisted with, to assure him of an out that he so often seemed to seek. That it was merely a comforting daydream, their little shop at the edge of the world, not a covenant Sol would chain him to. And Seth had immediately suffused the room with spores more effectively than a deadly fungus, because he believed in that little shop and he’d been storing all his belief in Sol for safekeeping.</p><p class="p1">So Sol didn’t dislike the memory, overmuch, but he was grateful never to suffer the full force of it again.</p><p class="p1">Sol had never wanted to steal Seth away forever. He had no illusions of its likelihood. No, Seth had two mistresses; one, if you understood his wife to be a manifestation of the other lady, the blind one. Sol was lucky in third place, though he might come out ahead, at least for as long as it took to build a house and for a badge to find its way back to Seth’s chest, whichever came first. <em>Run away with me,</em> Sol begged without ever seeming to beg, <em>run away from this, </em>without initially believing Seth would keep his promise. But keeping a promise was its own law, a law between the two of them, and once Seth had whispered it into existence in a moment of vulnerability, the taste of Sol’s come still fresh on his breath, he bound himself to keeping it. All Sol ever asked for was the little shop and the little bed above it and a few weeks where Seth would be in it, and that was more than a man in third place could ask for, and it was all he got.</p><p class="p1">He had no place resenting it, and besides, he couldn’t resent with half as much prowess as either Seth or his own mother, and so the catharsis of his sulk was rather wasted.</p><p class="p1">The first offence, Sol had told the truth: a passing comment about Seth holding no love for his wife beside a sense of duty. The second time, Sol had lied, claiming no particularly strong wish to follow through on their far-fetched plans. Both statements had been offers of absolution, a way to tell Seth <em>you don’t have to do this, </em>but the cosmic rules dictating the things Seth Bullock had to do were not for Sol to speak aloud. And so Sol learned to stand at Seth’s five to seven o’clock, as a deer vanishes in the twilight, and trust himself to recall the lovely sheen of Seth’s eyes without being downwind of whatever had caused them to glisten.</p><p class="p1">They often spoke this way: adjacent, the portrait and the silhouette. It befitted two shopkeepers well, the ability to converse without facing one another, shoulders brushing instead of opposed. Seth tended to speak truthfully without warning, after long silent storms of thought, and if Sol stood still and listened without a turn of his head, he would catch the tingling in the air that came with Seth’s trust. They did not look at each other so frequently because they did not need to: when they did so it was a reminder more than it was anything else. Seth seemed to know him better by scent, his head turning before his eyes when Sol entered a room.</p><p class="p1">It was rumination on the prettiness of moonlight that had once brought Sol to the creek, to watch for the flash of the rainbow trout in its deepest parts. The townspeople joked about the foolishness of the fish, dwelling as it habitually did in a pool so close to Seth’s door. Once caught, though, the game would all be over, and it seemed to flash iridescent and cocksure that it could only happen once, and wasn’t it better to grow fatter and lazier beneath the surface, for the victory to be all the sweeter when Seth’s boy—who was not Seth’s boy at all, though Seth would never shirk the obligation—finally brought things to an end?</p><p class="p1">Seth had acquired all the knowhow of a hardware man: which wood weathered best and how to join the beams so the house would be one to grow old in, and Sol provided nothing but peripheral company, rapt as he was by the fish in the creek, and thought what a funny idea it had been that they could ever have stayed shopkeepers.</p><p class="p1">Only William never got his chance, and the trout appeared less and less until Sol believed someone must have caught the damn creature to spare Seth the grief of it, or it had realised the error of its ways and hidden itself upstream. But every few weeks, so seldom that Sol almost forgot the fish altogether, he’d catch a glimmer of scale when the evening light fell on the water.</p><p class="p1">And so Sol had settled himself for a niche, a stolen season, playing second fiddle to the law and third fiddle to a rich widow whom he treated with the utmost respect to spite everyone except her, since she knew nothing of her placement in the orchestra of Seth’s favourite fiddlers. Sol had only counted on a winter, and only dared believe in it once Seth had so resentfully assured him it would come in time. He had counted on the little bed behind their shop that they would have to share—no question about building a second bed, a wasteful excess for a temporary situation—until Seth had built a house to put his wife in. Until Sol convinced Trixie, perhaps one night in three, that he was sufferable to sleep beside after sleeping with. It seemed he was suited to things done in thirds.</p><p class="p1">So he did not expect the frigid night in the late spring, bristling the eaves of Deadwood in a mould-coloured rime, when the sheriff slipped into the little bed, anticipating Sol’s question by proposing the excuse that he would be grappling with the town’s drunks til near-dawn—and <em>near dawn </em>was longer than Sol was expecting, even in the last cold snap before summer, where nights hurried past the equinox.</p><p class="p1">Sol kissed the spot on Seth’s cheekbone, and knew from the way Seth unraveled that none of the others did this, that it was his own little place. A quarter-inch kingdom, prone to plague and conquest and inclement weather. Sol kissed it and some of Seth’s voice escaped with his breath, the last time it would come with a puff of unseasonal fog, faster as Sol worked him out of his clothes and built a trellis from their shivering limbs. He gave Seth further reason to shiver, and Seth’s rough-worn fingertips traced the portrait of Sol’s face, a keepsake from a country Seth would never return to.</p><p class="p1">How could Sol ever tell him, when they lay face to face like this, Seth’s long fingers freeing the buttons from Sol’s union suit and slithering inside, how could he say: <em>it was meant to be enough? </em>For Seth to have kept his promise, to run away to the territory with him, for the long cold months wrapped up in each other? Sol asked for that, and he never asked for anything more. If Seth slipped now into his bed, stroking Sol’s cock and biting whisper-marks into his throat, riding Sol’s whines and hissing at the prickling of Sol’s fingernails, would he blow in again with the reddening leaves of fall?</p><p class="p1">A crueler man would ask: <em>which time is the last time, Seth? </em>And a braver man would be able to bear the answer, but Sol was more kind than he was courageous, and furthermore knew his place in the cosmos, knew he could satisfy himself between five to seven o’clock in the wintertime, if he was the only one who knew which part of Seth’s face he liked best to be kissed.</p><p class="p1">There was another star Seth had over his heart. Because Seth Bullock was ever a lawman, and Solomon Star was ever his thief.</p>
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